Auden was born 21 February 1907, in York, the son of a physician. At first interested in science, he soon turned to poetry. In 1925 he entered Christ Church College, University of Oxford, where he became the centre of a group of literary intellectuals that included Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, C. Day Lewis, And Louis MacNeice. After graduation he was schoolmaster in Scotland and England for five years. In London, in the early 1930s, Auden belonged to a circle of promising young poets who were strongly leftist. His book Poems, which helped to establish his reputation, focused on the breakdown of English capitalist society but also showed a deep concern with psychological problems. He subsequently wrote three verse plays with Isherwood: The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F-6, and On the Frontier. In 1937 he drove an ambulance for the Loyalists in the Spanish civil war. In the same year he was awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry, a major honour. Trips to Iceland and China - the first with MacNeice, the second with Isherwood - resulted in two jointly written books, Letter from Iceland, and Journey to a War. In 1939 Auden moved to the US, where he became a citizen and was active as a poet, reviewer, lecturer and editor. His Double Man and For the Times Being reflect an increasing concern with religion, which, he discovered, offered a better solution to his problems than communism. The Age of Anxiety, a "baroque eclogue" that takes place in a New York City bar, won him the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and provided an apt and convenient name for his era. His numerous other works include Collected Poetry, the Shield of Achilles, Collected Longer Poems, and several opera librettos written with the American Chester Kallman. From 1956 to 1961 he was professor of poetry at Oxford, and in 1972 he returned to Christ Church as a writer in residence. He died 28 September, 1973, in Vienna. As a poet, Auden bore some resemblance to T.S. Eliot. Like him, he...

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...The Enfant Terrible Master of Poetry: W.H. Auden
He has been described as "W. H. Auden, for long the enfant terrible of English poetry . . . emerges as its undisputed master" (Samson 227). W. H Auden is one of most influential poets of the Twentieth century, having written over 400 poems and countless numbers of essays, articles, and plays. Other poets have written poems and books celebrating his genius. W. H Auden’s works are genuinely his life and thoughts to include themes of unattainable love and loss, ethics and religion, citizenship and politics, and the anonymity of humans beings in the span of the universe.
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in 1907 in York, England, to a very religious family with a history of clergymen (Davenport 10). Auden credited his days in church with sparking his love for language. Auden explains, "It was there that I acquired a sensitivity to language which I could not have acquired in any other way" (Davenport 16). From the early age of eight Auden attended religious boarding schools, where he was first asked by a boarding school friend if he had ever written poetry. It was then that Auden immediately recognized his desire of being a grand poet. His unique talent was acknowledged a year later when Auden’s first poem was published in the school paper. He would later admit his passionate pursuit to be a great...

...﻿Emillie McClure
Comm. 110.04 – Principles of Speech
Dr.Craig Cramer
8 September 2014
Eulogy of Wystan Hugh Auden
Unique Achievements
We have gathered here to eulogize Wystan Hugh Auden, a man and poet of great and beautiful works of art. While I will not be able to recite and commemorate all of his works and their deeper meanings I hope to at least give a small insight on this great mans’ life through what could be considered only small sliver of his overall works.
W. H. Auden was not only a great poet during his life but an author as well as a playwright. An interesting fact about Auden was that he was most well-known for his chameleon-like ability to write poems in almost every verse form. This talent was one of the many reasons that he will be remembered as one of the leading literary influences in the 20th century.
Sense of Loss
He has left behind a legacy of work that has the ability to touch on and give written account to thoughts and emotions that, at times seem too difficult to express in our own words. One such time would be at a funeral, where one would be hard pressed to convey their emotions in a way that is clear but beautiful in the way that it is conveyed. I would believe it is only proper to quote a portion of Auden’s own poem that deals directly with this subject; its title being Funeral Blues. “He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday...

...
“The Unknown Citizen” Analysis
W. H. Auden’s “The Unknown Citizen” is a dark satire about what can possibly
happen if political and bureaucratic principles corrode the creative and revolutionary
spirit of the individual. The poem was also titled after “tombs of the unknown soldiers”,
tombs that were used to represent soldiers who were impossible to identify since the end
of World War I.
Auden wrote the poem shortly after becoming a citizen of the United States. He
came to the U. S. to escape what he thought was the repressive nature of Britain. It is
clear how this poem stands the test of time so well, because Auden’s exile could be
compared to the actions of the Caucasians who inhabited this country and set up a
foundation for U. S. governance that represented rebellion and resentment against the
repression and dominance of England.
Before arriving in the States, Auden left his hometown of Britain for the country
Berlin. He said that it was there that he first experienced the social and political problems
that later became a centerpiece for the majority of the themes of his poetry. After staying
in Berlin, he temporarily moved to Spain where he had a job broadcasting propaganda.
This experience made him feel even more morally ambiguous regarding his typically far-
left viewpoints.
His background suggests that he provides the character of the “Unknown Citizen”
as a...

...A Made World: Anthropocentricity in the Works of Auden and MacNeice
In his 1941 poem “London Rain,” Louis MacNeice writes “The world is what was given / The world is what we make.” In “London Rain” itself, MacNeice does not emphasize the latter sentiment, ultimately hinting at the difficulty of trying to “make” anything in his concluding description of his “wishes…come[ing] homeward / their gallopings in vain.” Yet for all the suggestions of impotence in “London Rain’s” final stanza, in MacNeice’s work as a whole—as in the work of his friend and contemporary W.H. Auden—the “made” world becomes a central topic. Both men draw heavily in their poetry on images of man and the man-made, emphasizing the extent to which the human permeates the world we know and suggesting both the role that humans play as the “makers of history” and the value of things that they make.
Discussing his long poem “Letter to Lord Byron,” W.HAuden comments that Byron is “the right [recipient for the poem], I think, because he was a townee … and disliked Wordsworth and all that kind of approach to nature, and I find that very sympathetic.” This interest in the urban world manifests itself throughout Auden’s poetry. In “Letter to Lord Byron,” for example, Auden describes “tramlines and slag heaps, pieces of machinery.” In “Stop all the clocks,” he lingers over an image of “aeroplanes [that] circle moaning...

...﻿Explore the theme of love in Auden’s poetry
Although he married the daughter of the German novelist Thomas Mann in 1935, Auden did not love her. This was an arranged marriage which allowed her to have the British citizenship and escape from Nazi Germany. Auden met his true love, the poet Chester Kallman, in New York in 1939. Kallman became Auden’s companion for the rest of his life. Love is a recurrent theme in Auden’s poetry but so are many others such as world war two, politics, indifference, nature or time. Therefore, we could ask ourselves how important love is in Auden’s poetry.
As Auden has been in love for the major part of his life, a lot of his poems talk about it or at least mention it. Among them, the most famous one is Funeral Blues as it has been used in the movie “Four weddings and a funeral”. In this poem, Auden talks about the death of his lover. It is one of the rare poems in which Auden assumes his homosexuality when he says ‘He Is Dead’. It must be said that at this time, being gay was unacceptable and people could even end up in jail for that (this might be one of the reasons why in the poem Roman Wall Blues, Auden talks about ‘my girl’ though we know that his lover was a man). In Funeral Blues, the poet describes how the lover meant everything to him, by using the lexical field of space ‘North’, ‘South’, ‘East’, ‘West’, time ‘noon’, ‘midnight’, but also...

...Student: Hassan Mohammad Hilles.
Instructor: Prof. Dr. Kawther Mahdi
Course Title: Modern English and American Poetry
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, in 1907. He moved to Birmingham during childhood and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse. At Oxford his precocity as a poet was immediately apparent, and he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.
In 1928, his collection Poems was privately printed, but it wasn't until 1930, when another collection titled Poems (though its contents were different) was published, that Auden was established as the leading voice of a new generation.
Auden first gained attention in 1930 when his short verse play called ''Paid on Both Sides'' was published in T. S. Eliot's periodical The Criterion. In the same year appeared Auden's Poems, his first commercially published book, in which he carefully avoided Yeatsian romantic self-expression – the poems were short, untitled, slightly cryptic, but free of philosophical abstraction. The collection had a powerful influence on Auden's peers, including Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Louis MacNeice.
Auden soon gained fame as a leftist intellectual. He showed...

...STOP ALL THE CLOCKS
Our presentation is about the poem Stop all the clocks by W.H. Auden, the poem is also known as the Funeral Blues.
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, North Yorkshire on the twenty first of februari 1907 and died on the twenty ninth of september of 1973 in Vienna. He is an english poetry writer, and made his debut in the thirties and fourties.
It is first published in 1936, but the final version came in 1938. The first version is not only less known but has 1 stanza more then the final, which has four. Only the first two stanzas are the same in both versions. This poem was written to be sung by the soprano Hedli Anderson, in a setting by Benjamin Britten, who is an english componist
In the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral of 1994 is the poem Funeral Blues recited by the character Matthew at a funeral. Because of this the poem became very well known by the audience.
The movie Body of Lies starts with a quote of Auden:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
We will now recite the poem.
Stop all the clocks.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the...

...punctuations and innuendos. In the first few line of stanza stanza one Auden starts off by recreating what the present condition was like at the time of his death to create a gloomier atmosphere to get the readers attention. He does this in most of his poem, creating an atmosphere to get the readers attention such as now the leaves are falling fast. “Now the leaves are falling fast” Auden recreates very windy atmosphere to start of the poem, to set up the lament which is “Nurse’s flowers will not last;” Auden poems are always well structured. And in refugee blues, the last stanza “Stood on a great plain in the falling snow; Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro: Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.” Is creating the scenery where no one can hide, a vast area where any other color would outstand the plain white snow therefore this last stanza is a very atrocious scenery for those experiencing it. Auden is always keeping the readers interested through different style of writing.
Punctuations used in the first stanza creates a clearer view of what the poet wants to express. The pauses “The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,” this is a clear structure that would urge the readers with energy to keep on reading. He also does this in control of the passes. Starts off the poem with a series of pauses to keep the audience attention “ Control of the passes was, he saw, the key”...